How Friends, Family, and Friday Night Lights Helped Me Fight Cancer

Facing a deadly diagnosis at age 34, TV writer Elisabeth R. Finch thought she'd get through it the way she had everything else in life: by being fiercely independent and utterly self-sufficient. As it turned out, it took a whole team to give her the strength she needed for the fight of her life.

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I catch fragmented glimpses of my bald reflection in the elevator mirror as I go up, up, up—to a white-walled conference room, where a small herd of well-groomed doctors, all equally inscrutable, awaits. Dr. Cryptic, a top oncologist here at Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, shuffles papers in a file larger than any 34-year-old ought to have. My finger absently traces the Port-a-Cath jutting from my clavicle when he looks at me and asks: You're sure you want to do this by yourself…?

The answer is yes. It's always been yes. The first word out of my mouth as a baby was myself. From that point on, my parents engaged in a relentless battle: their instinct to nurture me (as they did my perfectly docile older brother) versus my fight for independence. But even then, my mother and father swore that everything that made me a pain in the ass as a child—the strong will, the determination to make my own decisions—was going to make me an excellent adult.

So they lovingly looked the other way, perplexed, as I evolved from an adolescent TV junkie into a nature-loving, hiking, ice-fishing teen who eschewed dance recitals in favor of solo night hikes near our New Jersey home, who swapped prom gowns and heels for tangled hair and fishing gaiters. The only time I recall asking my parents for something, it was permission to skip two weeks of my sophomore year of high school to travel through Eastern Europe to research a play I'd decided to write. Later there were solo road trips to see the world's largest ball of twine and writers' retreats by a frozen lake in northern Minnesota. Contrary to my Jewish roots and my nascent Hollywood dreams—by third grade I'd decided to be a writer—I craved fresh air, dead silence.

So when the Hollywood writers' strike hit in 2007, six weeks into my first bona fide job in the business as a writers' assistant on HBO's True Blood, I didn't call my parents in a panic. I hastily threw together a backpack and hit a two-day hiking trail. I was gloriously alone. Euphoric—until a few miles in, when my foot got lodged in the roots of an oak, and my entire body crumpled, tearing cartilage, cracking my kneecap in half, and instantly turning my leg three shades of blue.

Four surgeries over the next four years couldn't fix it. And walking on a knee with only 17 percent of its cartilage was searing. But for me, asking for help would have been infinitely more crippling. So I kept plugging away. I wrote my first True Blood episodes. Costumers decorated my canes for premiere parties; actors stole my crutches for sport.

My salve came in the form of TV, of course, in a stack of Friday Night Lights DVDs filled with Coach Taylor's epic speeches about character and beating the odds. In one episode, the team is down, humiliated; the players on the verge of quitting. Coach goes to the locker-room whiteboard and silently writes state—shorthand for the team's ultimate goal, to make it to the Texas state football championships. State was the victory that would make every battle along the way worth it. "State" became the team's battle cry. And, in a very real way, it became mine, too.

Last year, still in pain, I crammed in knee-replacement surgery just before beginning my second season writing for the CW's The Vampire Diaries. I'd expected my surgeon to wake me from my morphine haze to say the problem was finally fixed. Instead he said, "There's something we needed to discuss."

Chondrosarcoma. One of three forms of primary bone cancer. They'd discovered a mass and removed it. So my leg was now fully functional, tumor-free. But a PET scan had revealed a tumor encroaching on my spinal column. "I've never seen anything like this, especially in someone your age," he told me. "Nothing about this is going to be easy."

I sat there, dazed, as he rattled off statistics. Chondrosarcoma is rare as hell: It accounts for less than one percent of all cancers, and the average age of diagnosis is 51—it's almost unheard of at my age. Mine was grade three, fast growing, which instantly placed me in the "poor" prognosis column and at high risk for recurrence. Worse, chondrosarcoma tends to defy conventional chemotherapy and radiation. Surgery is usually the best option, but my tumor had grown far enough into my spine that removing it carried a high risk of paralysis. Chemo might not work, but it was still my best chance. And I needed it immediately.

Ironically, chondrosarcoma wasn't necessarily the reason my knee hadn't healed—cartilage is incredibly difficult to regenerate under any circumstances—but the injury was the only reason they found it. "You're lucky we were looking in the first place," the doctor said. I was still digesting the juxtaposition of rare cancer and lucky when my mom entered the room, cutting him off. When he left, I told her the knee replacement had worked. And that's all I told her.

If this seems implausible—receiving a terrifying diagnosis and, 10 minutes later, concealing it from my fiercely loyal, devoted mother—well, I had learned from her example. Growing up, I saw countless instances of her generosity toward anyone who needed it but never once heard her ask for help. Instead, she faced every form of hardship—including her own diagnosis of breast cancer—with strength and silence.

I grew up convinced that adversity should be met with quiet dignity. So I took pride in not asking anyone for help, ever. It's not that I was antisocial. I've always had rich, enduring friendships; boyfriends I've loved deeply; a family to which I'm grateful to belong. But I'd always solved my own problems. I was determined to handle this the same way.

Turns out, there's no pamphlet on How to Be a Single Thirtysomething Woman With Cancer. Every oncologist I met insisted that I should freeze my eggs before chemo. When I told them that I wasn't going to waste time protecting the hypothetical children I'd never had any intention of having, they seemed befuddled. And when I defied Dr. Cryptic's orders to take an indefinite leave of absence from work—he thought chemo deserved my sole attention—he doubted my commitment to getting well.

When you're 16, work—paper routes, pedaling Dove bars around the lake at summertime—is something extra. And when you're 60, in theory at least, you have personal days banked, a nest egg, a pension, and someone already lined up to love you in sickness and in health. But when you're a young, career-loving woman living happily alone, 3,000 miles from your family, and on the threshold of true success, work is what you do. Writing is how I make my way in the world. It defines who I am.

So three mornings a week I went to chemotherapy, and then I went to work—because I had an outline due. A story to break. An episode to write.

For months, I told no one. I dodged awkward conversations, begged off of birthday parties with lame excuses. I endured frequent ribbing about sudden bouts of tardiness and my odd lunches of rice cakes and saltines, thankful that my hair had been kind enough to stay put for the first three months.

Meanwhile, the tumor grew. In addition to chemo, there were now daily doses of radiation. When it became necessary to inform a few key players, I did it in true Hollywood fashion: The first person I told was my agent, followed by my bosses: Julie, who instantly teared up, and Caroline, who asked permission to hug me. My first cancer hug, I thought. From that day on, they kept my secrets, rearranged writing schedules, made concessions I didn't feel I'd earned or deserved. In a world suddenly made of quicksand, they gave me certainty—and I clung to it beyond all reason.

Four months had gone by before I began telling my family and closest friends. I doled out pieces of the story via e-mail, told sunnier versions of my increasingly dismal tale over cheese-steak egg rolls and cocktails—the truth, fragmented, infinitely less frightening than the entire picture. I assured them I would be fine, because they desperately needed to hear that. And maybe, so did I. In truth, my options were dwindling.

By the time Mayo proposed a six-week intensive drug protocol, the spinal tumor had grown to the point that surgery was not just risky, but virtually impossible. Radiation had failed to make an impact; finding a chemotherapy—any chemotherapy—that would shrink it, or at the very least halt its growth, was crucial.

I left my Los Angeles office on a Friday in July, wishing everyone a great weekend, knowing that after I'd left, Julie would break the news that I was actually headed to Minnesota, and why. By Monday, my Port-a-Cath was in, a three-chemo cocktail pouring through my veins, my temperature skyrocketing. Dr. Cryptic listed the potential side effects, some of which I already had—dangerously elevated blood pressure—and some of which I might have to look forward to: liver failure, kidney damage, compromised breathing. "You really need this to work."

At a time when luck was in short supply, my best friend of over a decade, Nick, lived only 78 miles from Mayo. He insisted on moving into his brother's attic so that I could have privacy in his condo. While everyone had wanted to help, Nick was the first to succeed—mainly because he didn't bother asking if he could. He instinctively knew that the best (the only) way to help me was by treating my cancer like another job. He created for me the "Daily Three-Pronged Plan: Eating, Sleeping, and a Positive Attitude." Simple goals, achievable deadlines. And it worked. I was too focused on the immediate tasks to notice him pulling serious hero moves in the background, swooping in daily with ginger ale and frozen waffles; driving me to and from Mayo in record time; scraping me off his bathroom floor when I was at my worst.

Fairly quickly, the rest of my loved ones followed suit—refusing to wait for a request for help that they realized would never come. They unleashed a deluge of daily postcards and care packages: popsicles, favorite books, gift cards to every restaurant on Nick's block, children's superhero drawings, inspirational posters. There was a Friday Night Lights–themed box stuffed with memorabilia from the show and signed headshots. I even got videos of FNL cast members sending me personal well wishes. I replayed each of them a dozen times, unsure if my drug-addled brain had just imagined it all.

Mercifully, work also left me with scripts to edit, revisions to peruse. I watched the producers' cuts under a fog of Demerol, punched up dialogue about vampire-werewolf hybrids with a shunt in my spine. Yes, I was down 17 pounds, bald, vomiting relentlessly, but I was still living alone. Still stubborn as hell. Still working. Somehow I still felt like myself.

But when week five rolled around, Nick found me staring out the window one night at the downtown streets. I have cancer, I told him, as if I'd understood it for the first time. Without a word, he put me to bed with an ice pack, ginger ale, and two Percocets.

The last week of the protocol, "chemo brain" rendered me incapable of accessing anything above a sixth-grade vocabulary, let alone writing or reading scripts. Every minute was a humiliation. I wasn't a graceful, solitary warrior. I was a crumpled mess, sobbing when the narcotics quit working, every movement sending shock waves up my spine.

The night before the final test results, I tuned out everyone's phone calls, staring at the dark bedroom ceiling. If the tumor had shrunk slightly or even just stayed the same, the treatment would be deemed a success. If it had grown, there was no "what next." I lay there terrified, utterly alone. For the first time in my life, I didn't want to be.

Suddenly, my phone began buzzing insistently. I ignored it for a while, but when it wouldn't stop, I stretched my arm, wincing at the reach. I had two dozen texts, each with a photo of a different friend holding up a sign bearing one word: state.

By dawn, dozens more state texts had come in. Photos of friends. Family. Dogs. Babies. Total strangers. As stubborn as I was, I'd acquired a team of supporters infinitely more determined than I was. They didn't just happen to step up at the right place at the right time. They'd been there all along. I could no longer think of a reason to push them away.

That morning, Nick and I filled the first 60 miles of the trip to Mayo with irrelevant chatter. But as we got close, we both fell silent. He gripped my knee, and I concentrated on breathing in and out. We parked outside the clinic, my phone still blowing up with state texts. I asked if he wanted to wait in the lobby. He said, "I want to go in as far as you'll let me."

I call Caroline first, oblivious to the fact that she's knee-deep in script rewrites and vampire conference calls.

I tell her it worked. An audible sob escapes her mouth—the sound of someone who truly knows how close a call it was. Months later, I hear about the ripple effect of our conversation, as the news got out: tears behind closed doors, on an airplane to Ireland. Prayers said over Thai takeout in a friend's driveway.

The joy isn't short-lived, it's squeezed dry. There are a lot of cancer hugs. Beers. Friends light a bonfire, and I smoke the last of the medical marijuana as we watch my chemo clothes burn.

But the following months are riddled with setbacks, tumors cropping up in unexpected places. My doctors begin calling the cancer smart. Wily. Like it has a personality all of a sudden, like it's something I should get to know better.

We weren't wrong to be happy. When friends and coworkers continue to call me "their little goddamn miracle," I cringe, but don't correct them. The treatment was a goddamn miracle.

But miracles aren't always punctuation marks.

Last January, I returned to L.A., having persuaded my doctors and myself that I could continue treatment at home. Giant drug cocktails, measured expectations. On a late-night phone call, Nick is uncharacteristically quiet. I ask what he's thinking. He takes a moment before asking the one question that I haven't dared to ask myself: "How do you want to spend the rest of your life?" Tears fall down my face. I open my mouth to answer but realize I don't have to.

The next morning I'm back at work. On set, amid a swarm of actors, key grips, producers, I'm a walking cancer billboard, all steroid-y and bald, downing rice noodles from craft services so I don't yak during takes. Yes, there are moments when I crave answers, definition. Certainty. Yes, I still panic when I start calculating odds and years, measuring them against my career goals and the milestones of my godchildren. Yes, I'm often exhausted, relentlessly in pain. And yes, I'm genuinely out-of-my-mind happy to be surrounded by deadlines I can meet, work I love, people it never occurred to me before to miss. For the first time in nearly a year, cancer feels irrelevant.